Monday, December 23, 2013

One
of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), the Q&A
below is with Robin Osborne, Professor of
Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British
Academy.

Earlier
this year Osborne published an essay questioning one of the basic premises of
the OA movement — that research funded by the taxpayer should be freely available
to all. To claim as much, he said, was “a gross misunderstanding” of the nature
of academic research and of scholarly publication. Yet this was the premise of
the UK government-commissioned Finch Report, this was the
conclusion of the UK government when it accepted the Finch Report’s
recommendations, and this was the assumption of Research Councils UK (RCUK) when it
subsequently introduced a new OA policy.

Robin Osborne

Osborne’s
essay met with considerable hostility from OA advocates, who complained that it
was elitist, that it was insular and
arrogant, and that it was dim-witted. Doubtless Osborne
could have been more judicious in his choice of language when challenging the
OA movement. But then so could his critics when responding to him.

Be
that as it may, in conducting the Q&A below with Osborne it seemed to me
that three key questions arise from his intervention in the OA debate. First,
of course, is whether the arguments he uses are valid. Second, we might want to
ask how representative his views are. Third, we might wonder how Humanities and
Social Science (HSS) researchers (and
their societies) should respond to the growing demands that they make their
research OA, particularly since OA policies are invariably based on the habits
and practices of scientists.

As
my thoughts on these three questions turned out to be somewhat lengthy, instead
of publishing my usual foreword to this Q&A, I have attached an afterword below
it. I do this in the expectation that some readers may only want to read the
Q&A. At the very end is a further comment from Osborne in response to the afterword.

Q&A with Robin Osborne

Q:
In an essay you wrote for
the British Academy earlier this year you argued that Open Access “makes no
sense”. You explained, “There can be no such thing as free access to academic
research. Academic research is not something to which free access is possible.
Academic research is a process — a process which universities teach (at a
fee).” I think your point was that giving someone physical access to information
is not the same thing as enabling them to make use of it (As you put it, “For
those who wish to have access, there is an admission cost: they must invest in
the education prerequisite to enable them to understand the language used.”).

OA
advocates responded by accusing you of elitism. As palaeontologist Mike Taylor
(interviewed earlier in
this series) put it on his blog,
“[I]t breaks my heart to read this fusty, elitist, reactionary piece, in which
Professor Osborne ends up arguing strongly for his own irrelevance.”

Have
I understood the point you were making about access correctly, and how would
you respond to those who say that your argument was an elitist one?

A: Yes, you have understood
correctly.

The
charge of elitism seems to me extraordinary. If we did not think that there
were some sorts of communication for which there is prerequisite training we
would not have an education system. Once one has an education system one must
treat those who have been through it differently from those who have not been
through it — otherwise one is massively wasting their time. That means writing
needs to be adapted to its readership. That way what is written is less likely
to be misunderstood and is going to be more effective at making the points that
it makes.

This
is not to argue for the irrelevance of any form of scholarship, it is very
precisely to argue the opposite — that scholarship has relevance within a
particular context (that is, after all, what relevance means).

Q:
You also argued that there is “no clear dividing line between projects funded
by research councils and an academic’s daily activities of thinking and teach.
If there are fees to teaching there should be fees for access to research.” And
you further said that attributing any particular publication to a particular
funding body “is simply impossible.”

I
think you made these points in order to rebut OA advocates’ argument that
publicly-funded research should be made freely available to the public. That of
course is only one of the arguments used by OA advocates. I am struck, for instance,
that the university that has done most to advocate for OA is a private US
university — Harvard. When I asked Harvard’s Stuart Shieber why a privately
funded university has become a leader in a movement whose main rallying cry is
“public access to taxpayer-funded research” he replied, “Harvard’s
activities toward openness are based on the mission of all universities, both
public and private, to disseminate knowledge.” Would you agree that that is the
mission of all universities? If so, should not all universities and all
scholars be advocating for OA today, now that the Internet had made it possible?

A: The issue here is not whether
scholars should make some of their work available free-of-charge to the world
at large but whether scholars should be obliged to publish all work funded in a
particular way or that is to count as research that can be graded in a REF exercise
as OA.

I
have no objection to making suitable research available to all on a suitable
website. But in fact I know that I shall have greater impact — that is, be read
by more people who are in a position to make the most of my research — if I
publish within a particular framework.

So
I am currently involved a) in making my research on Athenian democracy
available in a ‘reader’ (‘LACTOR’) that will be widely used by A-level students
in the classroom; b) in producing a magazine (‘OMNIBUS’) aimed at
sixth-form students (now in its 34th year; I’ve been involved for 27 of those
years) which commissions, edits and prints short articles in which scholars
bring the insights of their research to bear on texts and topics relevant to
Greek, Latin, Class. Civ. and Ancient History A levels.

Neither
of these publications is free but publication in either LACTOR or OMNIBUS
format will get read and studied by more people than posting on an internet
site. And certainly my publishing the more technical research from which these
publications derive would have no effect at all, since the length of exposition
required for scholarly colleagues will turn off non-scholarly readers
immediately.

So
effective dissemination and OA simply are not the same thing. I’m an advocate
of the former, which is why I oppose being forced into the latter.

Q:
In reading your BA essay I formed the impression that your main objection is to
pay-to-publish Gold OA, rather than OA per se. You may know that Harvard’s Peter Suber (interviewed earlier in
this series) recently estimated that nearly
70% of journals listed in the Directory of
Open Access Journals do not charge an article-processing charge (APC) so they are
free to publish and free to read.

And
of course there is also Green OA, where authors continue to publish in
subscription journals, but then make their papers freely available by self-archiving
them in their institutional repositories. In their submission to the
Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee inquiry into Open Access earlier
this year The Classical
Association (of which you are a former President) and The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (of which I
think you are also a former President) said that they supported the principle
of Open Access to research, but argued that this can be achieved most
effectively by Green OA, so long as an embargo period of 36 months is applied. They
added that they do not feel that the subscription model for learned societies
is “in itself flawed or unsatisfactory”.

Do
the views of these organisations accord with yours? If not, in what ways do
your views differ?

A: You are right that my BA
article aimed primarily at Gold OA — partly because it was first written more
than 6 months before it appeared, when I was trying to get the BA to take OA
seriously, and at that point Gold OA was the chief game in town.

I’m
more cautious about Green OA than the CA/SPHS etc. have been, partly because
dispositionally I regard the approach that says ‘yes, but’ as politically
problematic when there are points of principle that need making, and partly
because there simply isn’t the experimental data to allow a judgement to be
passed as to whether with scholarly journals in the humanities 36 months is too
short or unnecessarily long. (The figure of 70% of journals listed in the
Directory of OA journals does not move me since in the humanities journals
serve niche markets, and so what matters is the practice of the journals
serving your niche.)

The
issue under debate is not whether a scholar should be allowed to make their
work available OA — if it were I would be fighting for that possibility. The
issue is whether scholars are going to be compelled to make their work
available OA however unsatisfactory the OA options are for them.

If
journals were being compelled towards a Green OA policy by market pressure,
that would seem to me fair enough. But instead the pressure is being applied by
research councils and by government when there is clear evidence that neither
research councils nor government have seriously thought about the consequences
or have any notion of the different publishing patterns in different subjects
and disciplines.

Q:
You prefaced your BA article by saying that the claims you were making about OA
were limited to research in the Humanities. You added, however, that “very
similar arguments apply to research in the sciences also”.

In
the recent Guardian live chat on OA that
you took part in I formed the impression that you found yourself talking at
cross purposes with those with a focus on the sciences. Do you continue to think
that similar arguments to those you used in your article also apply to the
sciences, or might it be that the situation is actually rather different for
the sciences (not least, perhaps, because there is much more funding available
for the sciences)?

A: I’ve become convinced that
there are some pretty fundamental differences between what publication means in
the sciences and what it means in the arts.

I
suspect that one sort of scientific publication is dominating the science
debate, and that there are other sorts of scientific publication that are much
closer to arts publications, but I do acknowledge that there is a big
difference between arts and STEM (though I’m not so sure about Mathematics…).

Q:
Another distinction we should perhaps make is that between journals produced by
commercial publishers and those produced by learned societies. I suspect your
focus is more on the latter (I think you are on the editorial boards of several
learned society journals for instance). The Classical Association and The
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies certainly drew the distinction when
making their submission to the BIS Committee. And they pointed out, for
instance, that excess revenue earned from their publications helps support the
Institute of Classical Studies and their other activities (conferences,
lectures, and seminars etc.).

Learned
societies often make this argument. Critics respond by suggesting that such a
strategy is back to front. If there is a shortfall in society funds, they
argue, it is more appropriate to increase membership dues than to tax readers.

Others
argue that scholarly publishing is currently inefficient and that OA offers the
best long-term route to improving the efficiency of learned society publishing
— see this Harvard
blog post, for instance, which argues that society
publishers would be under less threat from commercial publishers if they adopted
Gold OA, since shifting from the reader-pays to the author-pays model would
make the scholarly publishing market more efficient, and so help society
publishers, many of who are currently threatened by the “big deals” offered by
large commercial publishers. Do those who make these arguments have a point, or
is their argument erroneous?

A: In many learned societies the journal comes
free with membership, so it is not a matter of increasing membership fees
rather than charging for the journal. The journal is the major ‘good’ that the
society produces.

The
problem with the Harvard blog argument — that learned society journals would be
better off under a Gold OA policy — is that it ignores the desire of such
journals to be homes to contributions from independent scholars, retired
scholars, and young scholars who are unlikely to have access to appropriate
APCs. The more care a journal takes over its submissions the better they are
for such scholars, who often have much less chance of quality feedback from
other sources before submitting their papers, but by the same token that high
quality of care means that the realistic APCs need to be very high.

Spreading
what is now paid for by 1,000 subscribers across 10 or 12 contributors has
obvious consequences for the relation of APCs to journal subscriptions:
essentially scholars would be paying up to 3 life-times of journal
subscriptions for a single contribution…

There
clearly are some small scholarly fields where readership levels are small and
the particular readership so expert that it does not need much in the way of
refereeing or copy-editing. But in fields with a significant readership in
numbers and range (e.g. classics journals being read by school teachers and by
students) high-quality refereeing, which not only sorts out the good from the
bad but much improves the good, both refereeing and copy-editing are essential.
Refereeing is done free of charge because it is in the interests of the journal
and of the learned society that runs it.

But
when a commercial publisher asks for referees’ reports it pays for them. If an
author is paying for my refereeing services I am likely to think myself
entitled to some of what he pays. If a reader is paying for the product, then I
am proud to have had a part improving the product that the learned society
produces.

Q:
How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and
internationally?

A: Lots of resignation here, and
because Green is so much less horrific than Gold people have rallied behind it,
forgetting the completely objectionable compulsion that is being applied. I’ve
less sense of the position abroad, which seems to me to be much more varied, partly
because there are many parts of the world (e.g. USA) where the scope for
compulsion is much less.

A: Green is going to be prime in
the humanities; gold may be bigger in sciences. But primarily I expect
confusion as to what counts as Green, and a lot of multiple publication of
essentially the same article, partly in OA form, partly in non-OA form.

People
who want to be read in the humanities will stick with non-OA forms for some
time to come, except when compelled to do otherwise.

Q:
If you do support the general principle of OA, what do you think still needs to
be done to achieve it, and by whom? If you do not support OA, what do you think
should be done to resist it, and who should do that?

A: I think compulsion is to be
resisted by everyone in all circumstances. I find the attempt to pretend that
there is a moral issue here itself morally repulsive.

Q:
OA advocates argue that the greatest beneficiaries of OA will be those in the developing
world, where many universities can generally afford no more than a handful of
journal subscriptions. Would you agree that the developing world faces a
serious accessibility problem, and do you think that OA can solve that problem?

A: There is no doubt about the
access problems, and many journals have distributed copies free or at much
reduced prices in certain parts of the world for a long time. But without an
appropriate educational base most scholarly literature will remain ‘Greek’.

Q:
The seeds of the OA movement (certainly for librarians) lie in the so-called “serials crisis”, which is an
affordability problem. It was this affordability problem that created the
accessibility problem that OA was intended to solve. Publishers argue that OA
will be no less expensive. OA advocates, by contrast, argue that it will be
less expensive than subscription publishing. What are your views on the
question of costs? Does cost really matter anyway?

A: Yes costs matter. But high
journal costs were a product of scholars needing a proxy for quality. Learned
society publications provided that in small fields, but the problem in science
was very different. OA has done nothing to help that problem. The problem of
having a way in each field of sorting out the important research from the
merely interesting (or indeed the mistaken) is one that remains to be sorted,
OA or not OA.

~~

Robin Osborne FBAis Professor of Ancient History in the
University of Cambridge, Fellow and Senior Tutor of King’s College Cambridge
and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was Chairman of the Council of
University Classical Departments 2006–2012, and President of the Classical
Association in 2012–13. He is the Chairman of Sub-Panel 31 in the upcoming REF
2014. His work ranges over the fields of ancient Greek History, archaeology and
Art History. His recent books include the second edition of his Greece
in the Making, 1200–479 B.C.
(London: Routledge, 2009); Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010) and The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011).

His list of publications is freely
available here, but you have to pay for his books.

~~

Afterword: Background and futures

When
commenting on Open Access, observers often (and rightly) point out that the OA
movement has been driven primarily by scientists. One consequence of this, they
add, is that when governments and research funders introduce OA policies they
tend to build them around the research practices of the STEM disciplines, and then take a one-size-fits-all
approach, regardless of any differences between the disciplines.

Critics argue that this is
problematic, not least because it fails to recognise that the culture and practices
of scholars working in, say, the humanities and social sciences (HSS) are very different
to those of scientists. HSS scholars tend to use different research methods,
and they generally communicate their scholarship differently. (Academics in the
humanities, for instance, are more inclined to publish monographs than submit
papers to journals — thus, in the UK’s 2008 Research
Assessment Exercise,
only 36% of the history
submissions
were of journal articles, the remainder being monographs or volumes of essays).

More
importantly, critics add, HSS scholars do not have access to the same levels of
funding as those working in the STEM disciplines. Consequently, they say, any
model requiring that researchers pay to publish is impracticable for HSS
scholars.

Nowhere
have the potential problems of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach been more
evident than in the UK, where earlier this year RCUK introduced a new OA policy
(which was first announced in July 2012).